If you or someone you love lived through an overdose, you’ve already won. But winning one round doesn’t end all the others. The weeks afterward can take a serious toll on your well-being. And your mental health may feel like it took the hardest hit of all.
Understanding what happens inside of someone during and after an overdose, and finding the proper care afterward, can help you make sense of the event as you continue in recovery.
How and Why Overdoses Leave Lasting Mental Health Effects
During an overdose, breathing typically slows down to a dangerous degree, potentially leaving the brain short on oxygen. That air shortage may be the main reason an overdose keeps affecting people long after they come to. Some experts even compare it to a concussion, since both events affect the brain and both can stir up physical, emotional, and thinking changes.
If you feel slowed down or not quite like yourself, it could simply be due to the overdose your body sustained.
Here are some of the ways you may notice yourself slowing down:
- Brain fog: Your memory and focus may feel wobbly or unreliable, which can shake your confidence.
- Depression-like symptoms: You may feel heavy, or hopeless feelings may dominate your emotional landscape.
- Suicidal thoughts: Some people find their thinking drifting into darker territory, which deserves care right away—and if you or a loved one notices suicidal thoughts popping up, it’s best to call emergency services or the Wisconsin Suicide & Crisis Lifeline immediately by calling or texting 988, or hopping on to chat at 988lifeline.org
- Grief and trauma overload: Watching someone you love overdose can leave a deep emotional scar that may require therapy.
Post-Overdose Brain Fog Explained
After an overdose, your memory may start to feel weaker. Short-term memory loss, slower reaction times, and worse performance when completing daily tasks are all possible. These changes can appear right away or subtly build over time and surface months later. And researchers suggest that struggling to think clearly can deepen depressive symptoms—sort of like the brain fog calling up a sad mood to come over and hang out all day.
You don’t have to untangle that pair alone. Our inpatient team of board-certified psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, and therapists evaluates all your symptoms holistically in Waukesha, with medication management right alongside therapy.
Why Depression Symptoms Appear
Now you know that the brain fog you might experience helps beckon in depressed feelings. But you don’t necessarily need to experience brain fog before you feel depressed. Studies link depression with living through an overdose, and repeated overdoses with more depressive symptoms over time. We encourage you to seek out that help, whether you go to outpatient care or stick with group meetings for substance use disorder support, especially if you’re feeling suicidal.
Why Suicidal Thoughts Are Common After an Overdose
Researchers have also identified a correlation between unintentional overdose and suicide attempts, and repeated overdoses with more suicidal thinking. If your mind drifts toward not wanting to be here anymore, your brain may just still be healing from the trauma of the overdose. Please treat those thoughts as a reason to reach out today.
As we mentioned above, you can call or text 988 any time, or contact our Miramont team, with specialists trained to treat suicidal thoughts and run no-cost, confidential assessments 24/7.
The Mental Health Impacts of a Loved One’s Overdose
An overdose has an uncanny way of rippling outward to family, friends, coworkers, and the larger community. In interviews with people living with substance use disorder (SUD), researchers found that watching someone overdose can bring real grief, bereavement, and trauma, sometimes including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Some described relying on substances to numb those feelings, while others went emotionally flat after seeing it happen repeatedly.
You may be grieving people you’ve lost while processing your own close call. That’s an enormous amount of emotional baggage for one person to carry, and researchers called for the type of bereavement support and trauma-informed care offered at Miramont for people in your exact position.
How to Support Your Mental Health After An Overdose
Healing your mind rarely happens after one try, so it may be best to start small initially with these tips:
- Name your feelings out loud: Putting words to what you’re carrying may loosen its grip.
- Write things down: When your memory feels slippery, notes and reminders carry some of the weight for you.
- Tell one person your honest version: You don’t need a whole audience, just one person who lets you describe it in your own words.
- Make room for grief: Talking about the people you’ve lost feels harder than avoiding it, though avoidance usually costs more later.
- Say yes to an evaluation: A conversation with a professional could connect dots you’ve been staring at for weeks.
Find Support After An Overdose In Wisconsin
When mental health symptoms and substance mutually worsen each other, Miramont addresses both inside one coordinated plan. We help you steady your symptoms, build coping skills, and find your footing faster. Reach our Middleton campus or Waukesha center whenever you’re ready. You’ve already survived the hardest part, and you deserve support for everything that comes after.
